In an effort to make mobile apps work more like old fashioned Web browsers, Facebook introduced new technology Wednesday called App Links.

The links, which Facebook hopes will become a standard for sharing content in the expanding mobile-app universe, look like Web links, except they direct users to specific areas within mobile apps, instead of Web pages.

“This is how the Web worked and it’s awesome. Let’s keep it awesome,” said Ilya Sukhar, founder of Parse, a mobile-app services company Facebook acquired last year. Sukhar unveiled App Links in a speech at Facebook’s f8 conference Wednesday.

Facebook and others are tackling a key problem of the mobile-computing world: Users spend most of their time inside apps, rather than on the Web, but there isn’t a standard technology for linking content inside apps.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal that the company is banking its global user base of 1.3 billion people to push its standard to the top of the list. “We can help push that along and establish a standard and that’s what we’re trying to do,” he said.

Zuckerberg said Facebook’s strategy isn’t necessarily at odds with Google’s. “Facebook and Google are coming at it from different perspectives,” he said. Facebook’s goal is to “enable people to share content from different apps,” he said, while Google “is more about searching in apps.” He suggested that the mobile world may evolve so that “apps just mark up their views with all of these different kinds of things.”

One hurdle for mobile app links, Zuckerberg said, is convincing app developers to do the extra work to create them. Web links are basically automatic, whereas app links take an extra step. “The unfortunate situation right now though is that on desktop web or web in general, everything automatically has a URL,” he said. “But in mobile, it’s the opposite.”

Zuckerberg said getting developers to create the URLs will mean showing them there’s real value in doing the extra work. If app developers want to appear in searches, they might use Google’s standard. If developers want to attract Facebook’s billion users with links sending them directly to specific places within their app – like a song on Spotify – they might use App Links, he said.

“Those kinds of killer use cases I think are the thing that’s going to drive the adoption of this, but I think it’ll be a few years before this is really big,” he said.